


Noli Me Tangere, For Caesar's I Am

by Anonymous



Category: Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: F/M, Loyalty, Mentions of sexual violence, Pining, Symbolic Collaring, mentions of canon-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 10:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1222852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>(and wild for to hold, though I seem tame)</i> </p><p>Talia is old enough to speak for herself, but some time she may find it advantageous to have someone to speak for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Noli Me Tangere, For Caesar's I Am

Talia is taken away for her schooling, when previously all the education she had ever needed was acquired at her protector's knee. Her hand on his, her bruisingly strong little grip, her head of dark curls just within sight of him at all times. His own education had been received in fragments, viciously guarded treasures he'd had to kick and bite to defend. She'd long since passed the age where he could have attended to her instruction and education himself. She deserved schooling like other children, her father would have said, never mind that Bane had never set foot in a schoolhouse unless it were to burn it down. 

She did not suffer for the separation, and in fact, flourished -- when Ra's al-Ghul talks to her on the telephone, her serious small voice is lit with wry laughter. They meet in the back room of a restaurant financed by a crumbling syndicate, and she tells him in their shared language that she's missed him; he can't answer her just yet, in any language, but sets his hand on the top of her head and feels her straighten up beneath the weight of his palm. Talia is old enough to speak for herself, but some time she may find it advantageous to have someone to speak for her.

One day Bane comes to find that the child from the Pit has become a beautiful woman. Even in her underlings' lowest whispers. No one, least of all her father, has been ignorant of the unique status Talia holds in this place, able to roam with enviable freedom and exempt some of the harsher trials. It can't be on account of her youth, and if it's out of concern for her sex it's much too late for that.

How long had he felt like this? Had some part of him made designs on the child from the start? The possibility is vanishingly slim, he knows his own mind, but the fear of it eats at him -- that his baser instincts might be acting even when he himself pretended otherwise, the left hand deceiving the right. The seeds of this been planted back in the Pit, alongside his loyalty and every other aspect of him. It can hardly be new. It nevertheless hit with the sickening intensity of a boy's first love, and Bane, being yet weak, was brought to his knees. Had he ever really been so young, that the mere sight of a woman could torment him? Deprivation made the lowest of men voracious, roving in the dark, and he was neither innocent nor ignorant. 

His past seems dim and hateful now that he has been remade, but what kind of man had he been in those days? What kind of man would he have been, had fate marked a different lot for him? A soldier, a student, a prizefighter, a farmer's son. Had he been married? Had he ever committed rape? Had he lived like a monk? He strains to remember what "woman" really meant, before the pit and before Talia, before her mother. Her mother had been this age. Not too young to carry a child to term; not too young to die. Nevertheless, small. Such had been the price of Henri Ducard's freedom, a broken body unburied. 

There were many men who would have taken similar liberties long before. Bane breaks such men's necks where he finds them.

Fully-grown now she is tall and strong. Her simple clothes only conceal so much, and when she unbinds her hair or pushes up a sleeve for him to tend her wounds it nearly staggers him like an unexpected blow. It is always unexpected. She is his, she is a child still, nothing has changed between them, nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. The back of her sweet neck, the palms of her hands, the slice of her bare chest that gleams visible when her tunic is too loosely fastened, her bare feet. The sight of her fills him with anguish, twisting in his chest like a pestilence, but he has no small experience of pain on her behalf. Talia the child had been bright and prudent; Talia the woman is quick and sharp and her words and blows always find their mark. 

There is much to admire in her. She navigates through the complex politics of the League in a way that he, obviously monstrous, will never be capable of, and reports to him her findings. She is unbreakably diligent even in the face of seemingly-purposeless repetition. She radiates zeal like a saint's; she burns hot and untouchable and next to her he's less than the meanest scavenger. She is everything graceful in his life, all the more so because he's seen her struggle gracelessly and fail.

**

Talia's strong fingers trace along the leather strap and hesitate.

For a moment, between the one and the other, Bane is without support, left lurching and breathless as a fish out of water, nothing to do with all his strength. He draws one smothered breath and keeps his eyes on Talia's. 

She's hesitating, taking a long look as he wheezes and reddens; he can feel a track of mucus or perhaps blood cutting its way down his now-deformed upper lip and that shames him more than anything, the sloppy weakness of his current state. Scars, at least, heal cleanly. She lifts the mask up to meet his twisted mouth, and presses it into place like a kiss. Her hands are the sweetest touch imaginable, manipulating leather straps and locking cold metal in place. The new mask fits over his broken face like an ancient torture device, leaden and chafing; even the first sweet spray of anesthetic gas cannot kill the first discomfort of straps and metal sinking into their permanent places and meeting old scars and tender places. He knows how to breathe, how to sink down into the center of himself and find a new footing, and he draws his first deep unpained breaths until his lungs ache. 

When his voice is available to him as something unchoked, it comes out distorted like a rumble of thunder. His new voice makes a furrow appear between Talia's straight black brows, but she smiles.

"Hello again," she says, in their private language. 

"What do you require of me?" 

"I want you to rest, friend. Tomorrow I'll need you." 

She responds to the sound of his voice just the same as their old whispers and warnings, and she always will. There will be more masks after this one, more refined torture devices that don't conceal so much of his face or leave seams to cut him. Would that they could all rest as kindly on him as Talia's soft hands. 

He does not dream. It is not a feature of his personality, merely a fact; the drugs in their cycle, sucked in with every breath, numb the dreaming part of him dead and when he sleeps he sleeps like a stone. When he does dream he'll dream of her clear as waking; the warped orange half-light of the fire shines from behind her hair and she is pressed close to his chest. If Talia wanted to sleep with his chest for her pillow and his ragged sleeves for her blanket, then such was her right, for the rest of her life. If Talia wanted to watch from a place of safety while her protector struck the match and set it to the gasoline-soaked corpses of the proud and idle, she was queen and she held sway. 

The man called Bane grows strong again, and is repaired.


End file.
